Q + A - Steven Joyce

CORIN Steven Joyce if we
could start with how things are going to look now with your
support partners. Can you just run us through, National can
technically govern alone on what you’ve got at the moment,
do you think that'll hold?

STEVEN JOYCE –
National Party Campaign Manager Oh I think
there's always a chance you'll lose one in the specials. We
don’t know that yet and in fact I think I heard you saying
earlier this morning that it's been surprising how well the
votes held up right through the night. So we don’t know
the answer to that question, but I do know that the Prime
Minister will want to have relationships with the three
support partners that we've had, and those conversations
will happen pretty quickly. So I think you'll see a
government with ACT, United and the Maori Party, and
that’s the most likely outcome at this
point.

CORIN Let's work through some of
the others, what about Winston Peters, would you consider
getting on the phone to him just to add a bit of extra
lining?

STEVEN Well my suspicion is that
Winston last night was lining himself up to be the Leader of
the Opposition, just as he did pretty much in 2002 I can
remember when I came into the National Party, Winston was
declaring to all and sundry that he was the new Leader of
the Opposition, and that National was hopeless I think he
was lining himself…

CORIN What about
Speaker?STEVEN Oh
well I think he made that clear he wasn't interested in that
either, but I think what we will be looking to do, not
necessarily, I think it's highly unlikely that the PM will
want to reach out at this point, but what we will be
obviously looking to do is build a relationship with New
Zealand First a little bit over the next couple of years,
we've got to keep an eye on 2017, but of course there's a
lot of water to fly under that bridge too. I mean is
Winston going to stay around and contest next
time?

CORIN What about building a
relationship with the Greens as well. Do you do MOUs with
them or try to?

STEVEN Well I think
it's a bit of a matter for them. They have moved their
economic policy pretty far to the left and so has Labour,
and in terms of the Greens you know in 2008 when we did that
Memorandum of Understanding there was quite a lot of common
ground, but that progressively reduced over
time.

CORIN But if you could find common
ground you wouldn’t rule it
out?

STEVEN Well I think they’ve got
some interesting questions to answer, which is you know here
they are at 10% again and they had big plans to get to 15
and beyond, and it didn’t turn out again on the night, and
I think there's some questions for them in terms of, do they
want to always position themselves to a left of the Labour
Party and I think that'll be the open question. But
that’s one really the Greens will have to answer not
me.

CORIN How quickly can you get this
done. I mean will you look to do it quite quickly and get
on with things?

STEVEN Well I think the
Prime Minister has shown in the past that he likes to get on
to things and so while I don’t think you'll see a massive
amount of things happen today, but I think you will see it
move pretty quickly over the next week or
so.

CORIN The Maori Party again you
don’t technically need them possibly, but you would look
to bring them into the team and Cabinet as
well?

STEVEN Well we had a good
relationship with the Maori Party over the last six years.
The Prime Minister's on the record and I think a number of
us alongside him as well, probably the whole Cabinet would
say that we've actually been a better government because of
the involvement with the Maori Party for the perspective
that they bring, and I think he'd be very keen to see them
involved again in some way. But exactly you know how that
works, who ends up with a ministerial slot and who
doesn’t, that’s all got to be worked
out.

CORIN The moment of truth in the
last week, is that what got you that final burst that pushed
you up to 48? The backlash on
that?

STEVEN No I don’t think it was
that on its own, and I think if people are saying that
they're being a little bit too simplistic. It certainly
helped firm up intentions. I actually think fundamentally
and this is the bit that the Labour Party are already
showing signs of missing, is that fundamentally New
Zealanders think that this country is heading in the right
direction economically, that actually there is some truth to
the economic story, that despite three years of Labour
telling them that it's all a mirage, they're actually saying
no actually things are getting better for me. We look
around the world and we think the country's moving in the
right direction. And so I reckon when they got into the
polling booth yesterday, they said actually we don’t want
a change of direction. We don’t want a reasonably radical
prescription that would turn the place up on its
end.

CORIN Give us some things you're
going to do in the first 100 days. Is the RMA at the top of
the list, will you be saying to those support parties
you’ve got to back us on the RMA
changes.

STEVEN Well I think the RMA
reforms are important. They're important economically for
New Zealand and now we have a mandate that will allow us to
proceed with those changes. They won’t all happen in 90
days because they’ve got to go through parliamentary
process. There's the Employment Relations Bill obviously,
but there's a number of bills that we've still got to get
through. There's one of my own in terms of tertiary
education and so on. So those we will all want to get
through. We will be very conscious, one thing we've learnt
from being in government six years actually is it's the
legislation you pass in the first year which probably will
have the biggest impact on the economy and how it goes in
subsequent years, because otherwise you run out of time to
see those things take effect. So I think those are very
important changes. But we're not going to see very radical
shifts in policy. I mean I've already been asked this
morning will you throw out your manifesto and do something
else now?

CORIN But you do have an
extraordinary amount of power now. I mean for a third term
government you can effectively govern alone, you’ve got
one of the most popular Prime Ministers. That’s an
extraordinary amount of power, you could do whatever you
want.

STEVEN Well the reason the Prime
Minister is popular, and well liked, by New Zealand is
because he does not abuse the trust that they place in him.
He actually takes that responsibility very keenly. I know
without even asking him that what he will do is stay very
close to what he said he's going to do, he's done that all
the way through to this point. People ask why is it that
after two elections our vote's gone up each time, and I
think it's because of the trust they place in him, because
what he says he'll do is what he
does.

CORIN What about the Dirty
Politics, the Nicki Hager element of that. There are a
number of inquiries. Will you make changes after that book.
I mean there were some things in that book that disturbed a
lot of New Zealanders, it may not have changed their vote,
but there were a lot of concerns about the way politics were
being done. Will you make changes in the way politics is
done by National?

STEVEN There's a couple
of things there. Firstly there is a couple of inquiries,
but there's another point as well. That book at the end of
the day was Nicki Hager's catalogue of things he didn’t
like, and there were some of them that had been well
traversed in the public domain earlier. So for example the
Labour Party's website and so on, and were presented as new
shocks and new horrors in a very cynical timing relative to
the election. And so I think that’s why the public
discounted quite a lot of that, they saw it for what it was,
which was a fairly…

CORIN Are you
comfortable for the relationships with Cameron Slater for
example to continue in the way that they were outlined in
that book?

STEVEN Well you see most of
that is actually nothing to do with the National Party per
se. Most of that is actually…

CORIN It
certainly was for Judith
Collins.

STEVEN To be fair that wasn't
actually what was in the book. There's an issue there and
there's an inquiry and that will solve that issue, and
there’ll be an answer to that question. But I think what
we will see is a number of people perhaps on the outer
circles of the National Party, and frankly I think a lot of
people in the Labour Party who will be thinking carefully
and reflecting on whether the approach of potentially paying
for opinions on websites…

CORIN What
about the Official Information Act. That’s one area where
I mean in the next government, will that be sort of tidied
up and made a little bit more
accessible.

STEVEN I'm a little bit
cynical about this whole Official Information Act. I'm
reasonably new I've done six years in this job, but I'm old
enough to remember that every Opposition doesn’t think the
Official Information Act happens quickly enough, they want
to see everything now, they're always in high indignation
and high dudgeon about anything that’s
withheld.

CORIN Nothing's going to be
changed?

STEVEN I think in the fullness
of time we'll go through an exercise which will show
actually that National's been no different with the OIA than
other parties. There are grounds sometimes to withhold
certain things, and in fact Labour's ability to use official
information when they were in government in interesting ways
is being catalogued historically, so I think you're going to
see two things. One you will see a more sensible level
headed look at this and perhaps a less partisan look at this
over the next few months, but yeah I think the OIA stuff
will evolve. I'm certainly as one Minister, you know you
try to get everything out as quickly as you can, we don’t
always succeed, but actually I think New Zealand is well
served by the Official Information Act. It does a good job
in ensuring that information if brought out. I don’t
think there’ll be any problems making sure it's upheld and
looked after.

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